Phil Ochs Quotes

This is my collection of Phil Ochs quotes:

Does defending liberalism leave you friendless and perhaps wondering
about your breath?
(from Have you Heard? The War is Over!, 1967)

[The demonstrations were] merely an attack of mental
disobedience on an obediently insane society...and if you feel you have
been living in an unreal world for the last couple of years, it is
particularly because this power structure has refused to listen to
reason...Step outside the guidelines of the official umpires and make
your own rules and your own reality.

(from An American Ordeal: The Antiwar
Movement of the Vietnam Period by Charles DeBenedetti (Syracuse Univ.
Press, 1990).

America is two Mack trucks colliding on a superhighway because
all the drivers are on amphetamines.

It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles.
The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win.
Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity
of the world, you must make that attempt.
That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.

Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was
often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is
an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their
actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror
available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

From Broadside

"Leave the old and dying America and use your creative energies to
help form a new America, which would be de-militarized, more humanistic,
where the police are less hostile and closer to the community, where the
wealthy are not given unleashed power for the exploitation of the people.

"And, mostly because it's now a matter of life and death, reassert an
ecological balance with the environment, which means the people in the
oil companies and the car companies and the space industry and all the
other industries will have to be brought into account, so that there will
be a new definition of government which has to be closer to the people
and less close to special interests which are far more harmful than any
revolutionaries."

From an interview with Michael Ross, 1969

"I can spare a dime, brother, but in these morally inflationary
times, a dime goes a lot farther if it's demanding work rather than
adding to the indignity of relief."